Transparencia, comunicación institucional e información pública en Ecuadoranálisis de las prefecturas de Pichincha, Guayas e Imbabura

Resumo

Article 204 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador states that the transparency of public information is an imperative for the correct development of the exercise of the citizen's right of access to information sources. In this sense, its inclusiveness ?it involves all institutions?, expansiveness ?it involves all officials?, and unreservedness ?with the exception of those issues related to homeland security? promote a vast amount of information that must be managed in an orderly and systematic manner in order for it to be understandable and auditable by the citizens. Besides the legal framework, international regulations on this issue establish ethical precepts for facing the different levels of information. Organizations such as Transparency International or the Laboratori de Periodisme i Comunicació per la Ciutadania Plural of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have been developing audits during the last years, through the application of questionnaires, in order to measure the degree of legal and ethical compliance of public information. In this sense, we start from the assumption that institutional communication, understood as that issued by official public organizations, must be transparent for being efficient. At the methodological level, a mixed analytical form has been elaborated in order to frame the research issue, i.e. the scarcity of public information meeting the required legal and ethical standards. The former addresses the whole legislation affecting the prefectures ?provincial institutional bodies?, including the Organic Law of Citizen's Participation (2010) and the Organic Law of Transparency or of Access to Public Information (2004). At the empirical level, this analytical form with its indicators has been applied to the websites of the prefectures of Pichincha, Guayas, and Imbabura, with the general conclusion that legal requirements are still not met and, moreover, that political willingness to meet them does not exist.